Timmy and Pete Buy Some Books: A Short Film from Amazon

For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99…Books compete**{: .small} against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.—Amazon Books team, July 29

Two towheaded young boys, Timmy and Pete, are playing a first-person action shooter and a mobile-device game.

TIMMY: These computer Internet video games are radical, Pete, but what do you say we buy some books?

PETE: Books—now, that’s what I call bitchin’!

TIMMY: Here are some priced at $14.99.

PETE: Yeah, right! I’d rather read a free Web log that’s tailored to my ten-to-twelve-year-old tween demographic and spending habits. Nice try, greedy New York publishers! We know you fat cats are pocketing the extra dough instead of passing it on to your hardworking writers, who would be better off liberating themselves from this cumbersome, obsolete apparatus.

TIMMY: Dude, let’s go back to surfing the World Wide Web and—oh, snap! I hadn’t noticed these books.

PETE: Golly—$9.99! Why, that’s merely three digits! You could buy one with ten dollars and still have change left over to buy a sucking candy!

TIMMY: I just bought one by my favorite book-length content creator, who has exponentially built up his fan base by asking his publisher to price his book at a reasonable $9.99. That guy must have so many groupies at his book readings held in hip night-life establishments and not in boring old book “stores”!

PETE: Why are you buying six additional digital copies of that book, Timmy?

TIMMY: I feel safer having a few backups, in case I accidentally delete it from my device and from the cloud.

PETE: Smart thinking. Yo, yo, yo, check out this awesome book that all the youths have been SMS text messaging about on their Amazon Fire phones!

TIMMY: Gee whiz—it’s that young-adult book featuring two male and two female junior-high students without parents in a future dystopian society who discover they have supernatural powers and some other things happen.

TIMMY: How about we just buy four copies of it, since it’s so expensive, and we’ve almost spent our weekly book allowance?

PETE: So what you’re saying is that we’re buying approximately 1.74 times the amount of the book that costs $9.99 versus the book that costs $14.99.

TIMMY: It’s simply common sense, based on classic microeconomic-valuation modelling.

PETE: I think I understand—lower prices equals more books for book-crazy youngsters like us to acquire with Amazon’s easy One-Click Ordering!

TIMMY: Now you’re thinking, Pete. Fire up the Kindles, amigo: time for some hot-and-heavy reading action! Which long-form immersive textual experience are you going to engage with first?

PETE: Copy No. 7 of the $9.99 book. What copy of the $14.99 book—of which, again, we have purchased considerably fewer units, which ultimately reduces the book-length-content creator’s royalty payments, that is, after his unnecessary literary agent skims fifteen per cent off the top—are you going to read?

TIMMY: None. I’ve changed my mind, now that we’ve discussed all the indisputable facts. Twenty bucks for a book, rounding up to the nearest dollar and then to the nearest ten? What are these out-of-touch East Coast media élites thinking, while they drink their flutes of Champagne at fancy Park Avenue publishing parties that no one from Seattle ever gets invited to, even though they didn’t really want to go in the first place? If they’re aiming to hook the next generation of readers—that’s you and me, my dope home slice—they’re gonna have to think more about serving the consumer’s needs.

PETE: I know. I’m fortunate to have a parent who buys Amazon for her children to express “a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person.” That’s the definition of “love,” which I just looked up on my Kindle.

TIMMY: When I grow up I want to work at Amazon’s warehouse.

PETE: I hear that Amazon is the awesomest place in America for a fella to put some coin in his pocket, and any journalistic outlet that alleges otherwise is committing libel.

TIMMY: Yes, Amazon definitely does not force its employees to work in one-hundred-and-fourteen-degree heat with panopticon-like surveillance of their limited work breaks.

PETE: And even if it did track the movements of its workers with G.P.S. devices and penalize them for talking to one another, which it doesn’t do, wouldn’t it be worth it for the savings it provides for millions of consumers?

TIMMY: It’s an interesting thought experiment, Pete, and anyone who’s not a Communist would say that the answer is obviously yes. Will your mom let us read our new books at dinner? I can’t wait to tear into mine by softly depressing my finger on the touch screen!

PETE: Only because they’re at an economically rational price point, my main man. In fact, let’s thank her by buying her a $9.99 e-book.